Workers Of The World Unite

I was shocked, pleasantly so, to hear this from Chris Matthews as he opened his show Hardball on Wednesday March 10, 2011. He quoted Marx and Engels in his pre-show opener as he discussed the attack by Republicans on union rights in Wisconsin.

CHRIS MATTHEWS, HOST: Workers of the world unite. Let`s play HARDBALL. Good evening. I`m Chris Matthews in Washington. Leading off tonight: The Ash Wednesday ambush. The Republicans have won their battle with the unions in Wisconsin....

But its not just Matthews who is expressing this its also the American left who allowed the Republican financed Tea Party movement to take the political lead in expressing outrage over government bail outs of Big Finance and Big Business, and identifying the problem as not being capitalism but Big Government, Big Unions along with its racist attacks on President Obama as NOT being an American like them.

US left finds its voice over Wisconsin attack on union rights

State capitol building under occupation as tens of thousands turn out for biggest demonstrations since the Vietnam war

Proudly displayed in a corner window of the Barriques coffee shop, a block from Wisconsin's state capitol building, is a poster advocating Workers of the World Unite – not the kind of sign normally seen in shops in America.

But the last fortnight has been unusual. Tens of thousands have been turning out in this normally quiet midwest city for the biggest demonstrations in the US since the Vietnam war, and the state capitol building is under occupation day and night.

After a year dominated by the Tea Party, the American left has found its voice, and a cause, united against a bill backed by the state's Republican governor, Scott Walker, to neuter public sector unions.

What needs to be done now is to Build The General Strike for Workers Rights! The fact both these old Class War slogans have been embraced by American Workers in the 21st Century, when we have been assured by the right wing and its media that unions are a thing of the past, well as the saying goes; the more things change.....

Calls for a general strike are growing among union members and supporters as the state Legislature advanced a law stripping public sector unions of almost all bargaining rights, but it remains unclear whether strikes or pickets will appear soon.

Union leaders say the Republicans' fast-track passage of the bill has fueled strike talk, but for now most are urging legal measures such as recall of Republican legislators as a way to repeal the law.

"A general strike would be playing the trump card, and you don't play the trump right away, you build up to that," said Jim Cavanaugh, president of the 45,000-member South Central Federal of Labor in Madison.

The federation endorsed a general strike on Feb. 21 and on Thursday began distributing educational materials on how such a strike can be accomplished.

Madison firefighters’ union president

calls for general strike

‎

Joe Conway, president of the Madison firefighters’ union, said recently that the political situation has grown so dire in Wisconsin, he’d support a general strike.

“We should start walking out tomorrow, the next day … See how long they can last,” he told reporters with The Uptake. “This is a nation-wide movement to attack all working men and women in Wisconsin and the United States.”

His call mirrors one from filmmaker Michael Moore, who’s called on high school students and working people of all stripes to restart the American democracy movement and fight back in this latest round of “class war” against the middle class.

This video is from The Uptake, published Thursday, March 10, 2011.

When Is It Time for a General Strike?

‎"General strike" has been one of the chants that resounded through the Capitol during massive protests Wednesday and Thursday after the Legislature passed a bill that would remove bargaining rights for about 175,000 workers and create major obstacles to basic operations for unions representing teachers, state workers and local government employees.

As the Wisconsin State Senate rammed through their union-busting bill Wednesday night, people in the capitol chanted "General strike!" And I heard an echo. Not of 1934, the last time there was a general strike in the US, but earlier.

It was 1909, in the crowded Great Hall at New York's Cooper Union; a big union boss was talking about talks and a 16-year-old girl shouted out from the back: "WALK OUT"

More than 30,000 shirtwaist factory workers walked off their jobs after that. This week's International Women's Day celebrates the anniversary of that strike, by mostly young, immigrant women like 16 year old Clara Lemlich. 700 women were arrested, many more beaten and spat on for being "On strike against God."

They struck for eleven weeks. It was the first successful uprising of women workers in this country--but their success didn't go far enough.

And the General Strike is being proposed in the UK in response to austerity measures, again a nice term for attacks on public sector workers to pay for the bail out of the banks!

The threat of a general strike increases

‎

As expected, John Hutton’s review of public sector pensions has recommended that final salary schemes end. Hutton was across the broadcasters this morning, explaining that he was reflecting an “inescapable reality”:

“The solution to this problem is not a race to the bottom, it's not to hack away at the value of public service pensions. It’s to manage the risks and costs sensibly. The responsible thing to do is to accept that because we are living longer we should work for longer.”

Beside realism, Hutton’s guiding principle has been fairness. Final salary schemes encourage a “massive cross-subsidy from low-paid public servants to high-paid public servants” to pay for the “sudden spike” in pay at the end of a career. Hutton is “deeply troubled” by a policy that forces younger generations of public sector workers to “shoulder the cost and burden change”. Therefore, pensions should be determined by career average earnings.

At the moment, opposition to Hutton is split. Dave Prentis, the General Secretary of Unison, shied from attacking Hutton. Instead, he condemned the government’s decision to increase contributions at a time of “massive increases in the cost of living and pay freezes." On the other hand, Mark Serwotka, the General Secretary of the Public and Commercial Services Union, nonchalantly promised that “strikes are inevitable”, which places him among the ranks of the militant with Len McCluskey and Bob Crow. Christine Blower, General Secretary of the NUT, was adamant that “public sector pensions are not 'gold plated' and they are affordable.” The threat of a general strike across the public sector is now more serious; not least because its pensions are protected by complicated legal contracts. This will be an arduous struggle.

Pension reforms: Public sector workers to pay more and retire later ‎ The Guardian - 23 hours ago All state employees in the UK will be affected, creating the first legal basis for ... less likely that the entire public sector will go on general strike, ... Video: Eagle: 'Pensions are not gold-plated' ITN NEWS Delegates: 'Go out like Wisconsin'‎ - Morning Star Online Now doctors and headteachers threaten to strike over pensions‎ - Independent

The Guardian

'Secret plan' to counter general strikes in UK ‎ TwoCircles.net - 22 Feb 2011 By IRNA, London : A secret 'war plan' to counter a general strike has been drawn up by British ministers, with thousands of union-busting workers lined up ...

Class War-ren Buffet

The Labour movement in the United States responded to the attacks on public sector workers union rights in Wisconsin with a limp defeatist campaign entitled Stop the War on Workers....at least Warren Buffet, America's folksy Billionaire, got it right....it's Class War!

"There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, t

he rich class, that's making war, and we're winning." –

Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett,

quoted in the New York Times, November 2006

“I believe we are in the midst of an irrepressible labor conflict that has pitted the haves versus the have-nots,” said University of Wisconsin, Green Bay, history professor Andrew Kersten at the conference. “As Warren Buffett has said recently, ‘There is a class war, alright, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s waging it, and we’re winning.’ It’s not merely the money or the political power they crave, they seek to transform the way we think and act on a daily basis.”

Warren Buffett created a stir in the billionaires' club when he told a New York Times reporter that America is in the midst of class warfare and that the rich are winning. Buffett made this comment as deregulation in the banking industry, tax cuts for the rich and runaway spending on Middle Eastern wars were setting the world up for a global recession. The predictable economic collapse which was made inevitable by tax cuts, wars and deregulation is now being deepened by political leaders who insist that the way out of this disaster is -- and please try to resist sticking a sharp stick in your eye when you read this -- by tax cuts for the wealthy, further deregulation and doubling down in our war in Afghanistan.

All in all there is a class warfare currently going on, under the covers, which even the great Warren Buffet has admitted to in an interview in 2005 with CNN's Lou Dobbs, wherein they said: "DOBBS: ... In 1983, Alan Greenspan, the Fed chairman, he had a very simple idea: raise taxes. That's what you're saying here. BUFFETT: Sure. But I wouldn't raise the 12-point and a fraction payroll tax, I would raise the taxable base to above $90,000. DOBBS: That's a progressive idea. In other words, the rich people would pay more? BUFFETT: Yeah. The rich people are doing so well in this country. I mean, we never had it so good. DOBBS: What a radical idea. BUFFETT: It's class warfare, my class is winning, but they shouldn't be..."

Money Talks.

But, oh no, we can't raise marginal tax rates a lousy 4.6 percent on incomes above $250,000. Perish the thought. Never mind that the past 30 years have seen the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans increase their share of the national wealth from 7 percent to approximately 23 percent. Nor that, according to a study by the Economic Policy Institute, corporate CEOs who made 24 times more than a typical worker in 1965 now earn about 275 times more than the guys in the shop. Assuming the shop hasn't closed down and moved to Thailand, that is.

• Continue reading

But heaven forbid we bring back Clinton-era tax rates. Instead, let's stimulate the economy by putting a few hundred thousand federal employees on the street. That'll work.

"There's class warfare, all right," Warren Buffett, the multibillionaire investor told the New York Times in 2006, "but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning."

Meanwhile, in Wisconsin, a brand-new Republican governor largely financed by the infamous Koch brothers, the Scrooge McDuck type of billionaire, has identified even more sinister enemies of the common man: schoolteachers, nurses and the guys who drive snowplows.

Gov. Scott Walker, an Eagle Scout and career politician, came into office spouting the usual Tea Party humbug: lower taxes, fiscal restraint. Then he pulled a bait and switch worthy of the cheesiest kind of used car dealer. First, he persuaded the Republican-controlled Legislature to pass $140 million in corporate tax cuts. Then he announced a $137 million budget deficit that could only be closed by making public employees pay a substantially higher share -- as much as 12 percent of their salaries -- for their healthcare and pensions.

As events in Egypt showed, you never know what will set off mass protest.

Here at home, over-reaching by a novice Republican governor of Wisconsin has finally triggered the protest marches that have been eerily missing during the more than three years of an economic crisis that has savaged the middle and bottom and rewarded the top.

It's not as if we lack a politics of class. As mega-investor Warren Buffett famously said, there is plenty of class warfare in America, but the billionaire class is winning.

This economic crisis, after all, was brought on by excesses on Wall Street. Yet with the rest of the economy still mired in high unemployment and fiscal crises of public services, Wall Street was first to be bailed out, the first to return to exorbitant profitability, and the last to be held accountable.

Month after month, progressives have been asking each other, where are the mass protests?

You might expect popular indignation to be focused on the banks. Instead, the economic unease of ordinary people has been substantially captured by the Tea Party right and directed against government, while Beltway politicians of both parties are outdoing one another to vie for the role of more austere deficit hawk, which will hardly win back popular support for the public sector.

Then the newly energized Republicans made a couple of big mistakes. One was trying to cut too deep, on the heels of a massive tax cut for the rich. But the other miscalculation was to declare war on the one bastion of organized economic representation of regular people -- the labor movement.

With new legislative majorities in 18 states, several freshman Republican governors are hoping to withdraw collective bargaining rights from public employees and to otherwise demonize nurses, teachers, fire-fighters, cops, sanitation workers and others who have managed to hang on to decent pensions and health coverage.

This looked to be a cakewalk. Public workers, seemingly, are an easy target. After all, they still have jobs and benefits. Instead of demanding to know why our own pension and health coverage is so lousy, the rest of us are supposed to resent middle income workers in the public sector for having health and pension benefits better than ours. It is a carefully cultivated politics of division and resentment.

But this time, Republicans overreached, and the long smoldering economic unease has finally sparked mass demonstrations. Rather than following the script and resenting public employees as a privileged "other," the citizens of Madison increasingly view teachers, nurses, cops, firefighters, and other public workers as their violated neighbors.

One recent poll showed that two-thirds of Wisconsin citizens polled (none from public employee families) felt that Walker had gone too far. Even citizens who wanted public workers to pay more of the costs of their benefits concluded that his scheme was excessive. Another poll, sponsored by an Illinois Manufacturers Association, found a similar result.

Now, mass protest has broken out in other states where Republican governors are attacking unions, tens of thousands of other citizens are joining their union brothers and sisters, and even the mainstream press is taking sympathetic notice. In a fine piece in Saturday's Times, Michael Cooper and Kit Seelye asked: "Is Wisconsin the Tunisia of collective bargaining rights?"

Maybe it is. And not just of collective bargaining rights.

At long last, resentment against the economic crisis is beginning to find its natural home, where it always belonged -- against financial elites, their privileges and Republican allies. It is dawning on ordinary voters that something is wrong when hedge fund billionaires and investment bankers are making more than ever, while public workers (average Wisconsin pay: $48,000) are being made the scapegoats.

Workers of the World Unite...

The analysis of Karl Marx, believed archaic and irrelevant only a few short years ago, have again become highly relevant. Our social and economic conditions, for all the bluster and noise of the 20th century, are fundamentally unchanged from where they were in the 1800s.

The 20th century was a time of optimism. The American dream was validated. The radicalism of the previous century was forgotten after World War 2. Radicals like Karl Marx were proven to be wrong. Since 2008 however, the jury has reconvened. And in that jury box we come cannot help but be impressed. Consider, for an example, these two quotes from the Communist Manifesto, written 1848:

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarians, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.

And...

Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of their battles lies, not in the immediate result, but in the ever expanding union of the workers. This union is helped on by the improved means of communication that are created by modern industry, and that place the workers of different localities in contact with one another. It was just this contact that was needed to centralise the numerous local struggles, all of the same character, into one national struggle between classes.

If Marx were alive today, if he were witness to the struggles through Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and America he would not be surprised. He saw it coming. He saw it coming because he understood the nature of capitalism.

While we may not want to run out and join our local band of communists, we may want to reconsider many of the observations that were relevant in the 19th century not only from Marx, but from others. Strangely enough, for all the progress we have made over the past century, we seem to be back, more or less, where we started from.

We now live in a time of ruthless, predatory capitalism.It takes no prisoners and when it does, it tortures them. Since the 1980s workers have faced stark choices. Threats to move manufacturing abroad have actually been promises. Unions have become crippled and powerless.

The two pillars of working class strength, strong unions and public spending, have been reduced to ineffective shadows of their former selves. The social democratic response is limited to asking for more, for a larger piece of the pie. That is because the fundamental ideology of social democratic movements and parties are reformist. The aim is to reform capitalism; to redistribute wealth. In the past this objective has been met in some places more so than in others. And if we learn anything from history, we know that you don't 'ask' the billionaire class for anything. You demand and you are prepared to back your demands, or stay home.

Today, unions are powerless because the bosses have become radical and right wing to the extreme. The only principles they adhere to beyond cold pragmaticism are cold and calculating neo liberal policies, policies that boldly proclaim, it's every man for himself. Sink or swim. They would rather ship jobs away or close shop than negotiate. Social democratic political parties merely parrot the wishes and policies of the private sector. If social democrats want to strengthen the safety net, a powerful assault from the right, from bond rating agencies and even the IMF will efficiently put them down.

Losing the Future

President Obama wanted to be the Education President, with his State of the Union speech entitled Winning the Future. Where he said;"Cutting the deficit by gutting our investments in innovation and education is like lightening an overloaded airplane by removing its engine. It may feel like you’re flying high at first, but it won’t take long before you’ll feel the impact."

Here is the sound of Air America crashing:

Rhode Island school district issues pink slips to nearly 2,000 teachers in effort to deal with massive budget deficit

Guess they missed the Presidents State of the Union speech when he said;

If we take these steps – if we raise expectations for every child, and
give them the best possible chance at an education, from the day
they’re born until the last job they take – we will reach the goal I
set two years ago: by the end of the decade, America will once again
have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world.

See this is what happens when Republicans sweep local elections, grab governorships and state houses and legislatures, when they say spending cuts they mean attack on public sector workers and services, and in the final end union busting.

In his letter to the entire school department, republished in The Providence Journal, Brady wrote, "Since the full extent of the potential cuts to the school budget have yet to be determined, issuing a dismissal letter to all teachers was necessary to give the mayor, the School Board and the district maximum flexibility to consider every cost savings option."

Ah ha flexibility, that means instead of laying off the teachers, which would require rehiring based on union seniority rights, they have fired everyone giving themselves the option of rehiring whomever they like. In effect union busting.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (WPRI) - Hundreds rallied on the steps of the State House in Providence Saturday as they stood behind their fellow protestors from Wisconsin.

The Rhode Island Teacher's Union marched to show support for their Wisconsin colleagues vying to keep their collective bargaining rights and to preserve the American dream.

"We're not gonna let them take away collective bargaining from us...it is time for every worker and every person in America to stand up and fight corporate greed," urged one protestor Saturday.

Mixed in among the crowds were Providence teachers who protested the recent firing of some 2,000 teachers in the district.

"Get down to city hall and tell Angel Taveras he has betrayed us...this is not just about a budget trying to bust our union," said Classical Teacher Anna Kuperman.

Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval has shown "contempt" for public school teachers by proposing to cut their pay by 12 percent to 20 percent, the state teachers union leader said Thursday.

Lynn Warne, president of the 28,000-member Nevada State Education Association, said the annual starting pay of teachers -- now about $35,000 -- would drop to the $30,800 range in Clark County through the Republican governor's budget-cutting proposals.

"We feel an assault on education in this state," Warne told a joint Senate-Assembly budget committee hearing. "There is an assault on state workers as well."

Warne later explained that besides a 5 percent pay cut, teachers also would pay a 1.125 percent additional premium for retirement benefits and Sandoval also wants them to kick in 5.9 percent to help cover Public Employees Retirement System costs. That would bring every teacher's pay reduction to 12 percent.

Jeff Weiler, chief financial officer of the Clark County School District, said his district will have to lay off 2,500 teachers and 700 support personnel if Sandoval's plan wins approval.

The average class size would be increased by eight students and laid-off teachers would go on unemployment, he said.

The right wing pundits like to talk about 'class war' whenever someone mentions taxing the rich. This is what real class war looks like, union busting by Republicans. And it won't stop with the public sector unions.

In Wisconsin, the governor wants to gut collective-bargaining rights for public employees. Not to be outdone, the governor of Indiana is pushing two bills that would end bargaining not just for public employees but also for the private sector on construction projects (House Bills 1585 and 1216). In Ohio, Senate Bill 5 would end collective bargaining for state employees and take the heart out of bargaining for local government workers.

Governor Walker’s cuts aren’t just about Wisconsin. These legislative attempts to limit workers’ rights are a coordinated effort by the GOP and corporate CEOs trying to push cuts in our wages, abolish our benefits and outsource our jobs.

Public officials in several other states like Ohio, New Jersey, and Michigan are also set to consider eliminating collective bargaining (a worker’s ability to negotiate for wage increases, healthcare, job security, retirement plans, etc…) or drastically change employee pension and access to affordable health insurance.

In many states, public officials aren’t willing to negotiate with the unions that help protect the workers who keep states running—social and economic protections that help communities of color the most.

The Republican National Committee could not care less about the U.S. economy. A new RNC fundraising video (http://www.gop.com/obamasunionbosses/email/) demonstrates that it wants Americans to forget about our economic problems.

Instead the RNC has conjured up a new boogeyman to scare Americans enough to forget the past and open up their wallets: Union leaders.

“The RNC is trying to fool the public into thinking that they are defending the middle class against unions, and that is both outrageous and offensive,” said IAFF General President Harold A. Schaitberger. “Who do they think created the middle class? If they are successful in their efforts to destroy unions, there will be no middle class in America.”

The video seeks to paint middle class Americans – the teachers, sanitation workers, fire fighters and police in Wisconsin -- desperately trying to defend their collective bargaining rights as “jack-booted thugs.”

Unfortunately the firings in Providence this weekend were not a one off, nor should they have been unexpected as they had been done as early as last year, with support not only of Republicans but President Obama as well.

4 March 2010

Speaking before an audience of business executives at the US Chamber of Commerce on Monday, Obama hailed the decision to fire the entire teaching and support staff at Central Falls High after they rejected demands to work extra hours without pay.

He defended such measures as critical to implementing the national strategy of Education Secretary Arne Duncan to deal with 5,000 of the nation’s “lowest performing” schools, overwhelmingly located in the most impoverished areas of the country. In order to qualify for federal funding, school districts have the option of closing a school outright, handing it over to a charter school or school management company, imposing a longer school day and other attacks on teachers, or firing the staff and rehiring only half back.

Pointing to the 74 teachers and 19 other school employees in Central Falls, Obama insisted that teachers had to be held “accountable.”

The Rhode Island firings are meant to serve as an object lesson and warning to any teachers who dare oppose the destruction of their working conditions and wages and the government’s efforts to undermine and privatize the schools.

Class War Returns

Once again the right wing in Canda has declared class war, on the heals of the attacks on public sector workers by the Harpocrite government.

Premier Ed Stelmach's government should expand no-strike legislation for public-sector employees to blunt the unions' main bargaining tool in contract negotiations, says the Alberta director for the Canadian Federation of Independent Business. Such a move, said Danielle Smith, would help deflate public sector payrolls. A national CFIB study examining the gap between wages paid in the public and private sectors at all three levels of government shows on average, public employees earn considerably more, especially when pensions and benefits are included. Federal employees get 17.3% more; provincial 7.9% more
A hiring freeze to shrink public payrolls or expanded no-strike legislation could help achieve that, she said. Now the question arises how politically realistic such measures are, given at the federal level, expanded non-strike provisions, as suggested by the Tory minority government, helped precipitate a putsch by the Opposition.

Dannielle Smith is a Calgarian like the PM, a former Fraser Institute student, a scab during the Calgary Herald Strike, a fellow traveler of the Canadian Reform/Alliance/Conservative party, do ya think this survey may have been leaked to the Harpocrites earlier than its release today to justify their attack on the public service unions in the fiscal update?

Once again the right wing ideolouges promote class war while claiming to speak for taxpayers, who really are not taxpayers but business interests who pay little or no taxes. The real taxpayers are the working class, especially those who are unionized and pay the highest taxes!

SEE:
Harpocrites Declare Class War
Wage Controls

Ed Stelmach Hires Scab

Union Busting Alberta Style

Tags
Harper, Conservatives, deficit, Government, politics, Flaherty, CFIB, PSAC, politics,Canada, Danille Smith, Economy, stike, wage controls,

Harpocrites Declare Class War

While pundits of the right claim the governments downfall is due to its attack on the democratic reform of public financing of political parties they overlook the fact the Harpocrites declared class war in their fiscal update.

Canada's largest federal union is planning to join a national campaign for public servants to support a coalition government and topple the minority Conservative government.
The Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC) is joining a number of groups, including the Canadian Labour Congress, to back a Liberal and NDP coalition after accusing the Conservatives of failing to provide enough stimulus to kick-start a weakening economy.
The decision comes after the government of Stephen Harper backed down on a plan to take away the unions' right to strike when it introduces legislation to limit public servants wage increases to 6.8% over four years.
PSAC president John Gordon rejected suggestions such a campaign violates the bureaucracy's non-parti
Mr. Gordon said the union was willing to restrain wages and do its bit for the economy when it agreed to the government's 6.8% deal, but was incensed when Finance Minister Jim Flaherty's economic statement offered no stimulus package for the economy and then heaped "another slap" on federal workers by taking away the right to strike and collective bargaining, rolling back wages of workers whose contracts were already settled.


SEE:
Wage Controls


tags
Harper, Conservatives, deficit, Government, politics, Flaherty, Budget, PSAC, politics,Canada, Surplus, Economy, stike, wage controls,

Pakistan: Feudalism Not Democracy

While the pseudo democrats of the Bush and Harper regimes bemoan the passing of Benazir Bhutto let us not forget that she, her family and their political party do not reflect a movement of democracy but rather the entrenched feudal interests of Pakistan's ruling classes.

To one side of the villa is the town of Nau Dero itself; to the other, the family's expansive estates, mirroring the separation between Pakistan's political elite and the country's teeming millions. Today, under the portraits of her hanged father and dead brothers, her testament will be read by Bilawal, her grieving 19-year-old son.

The family's franchise on political leadership will be handed on. The will's contents will determine the future not simply of her party, the Pakistan People's Party, but of Pakistan. But whether it contains enough to stop the violence is, perhaps, out of the Bhutto family's hands as the nation teeters on the edge of perhaps the worst bloodletting since Partition in 1947.

TIME reports that Benazir Bhutto’s son will likely be named on Sunday as new Pakistan People’s Party leader

As Georg Luckas points out in History and Class Consciousness, his seminal ultra left text which should be mandatory reading for all who claim a revolutionary class struggle perspective , this is the political reification of feudalism, that the poor and oppressed identify not with their class interests but with the landlord class.

It is difficult to imagine any good coming out of this tragedy, but there is one possibility. Pakistan desperately needs a political party that can speak for the social needs of a bulk of the people. The People's party founded by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was built by the activists of the only popular mass movement the country has known: students, peasants and workers who fought for three months in 1968-69 to topple the country's first military dictator. They saw it as their party, and that feeling persists in some parts of the country to this day, despite everything.

In effect there has been no bourgeois revolution in Pakistan that would allow it to evolve a modern capitalist democratic state. The creation of modern Pakistan sixty years ago was a still born bourgeois state.

The coming civil war is the failure of the bourgeois class struggle in Pakistan, to create the conditions for a modern capitalist state. Class War Not Civil War!

See:

Pakistan A Fascist State


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Police Brutality

This is not just an issue of the weapons used by police, in particular the RCMP, such as tasers, pepper spray, batons or guns. It is about a police culture that sees citizens as bad guys and themselves as the good guys. We are all criminals in their eyes. They have forgotten their jobs are to 'serve and protect' the citizens not just the state or property owners.

This is the fourth taser related death in a month. It appears that the police believe it is okay to apply deadly force against those 'acting erratically', that is mentally disturbed. And you thought the death penalty was banned in Canada. Nor did you think it applied to people suffering from mental illness.

VANCOUVER - The RCMP has launched a number of investigations into the Saturday morning death of Robert Thurston Knipstrom, 36, four days after he was pepper-sprayed, Tasered and hit with a baton in an altercation with police. The incident is now being handled as an in-custody death, RCMP said in a news release.

"Because of the possibility that the police use of force could have been a factor in the individual's medical injuries, the RCMP began the in-custody-related investigative protocols from the very beginning," said the police release.

Knipstrom was taken to hospital in extremely critical condition after a confrontation with police at the EZ Rental Centre in Chilliwack, B.C., on Monday.

He had been seen driving dangerously through city streets, forcing other vehicles to avoid him. When police arrived, they said they found Knipstrom acting agitated and erratic. They used pepper spray, Tasers and police batons to try to restrain him, but were forced to call in backup when those tactics failed.

As my pal April Reign so aptly put it;

My family and I along with other activists from Bread and Roses attended the rally to remember Robert Dziekanski and to demand an investigation into his death.

As was stated at the rally this is no longer just about 4 officers, or TASER™’s this is about a culture and climate of political change which has allowed and encouraged the police to see the general public as an enemy to be subdued.

The culture of the police state has long existed, even before the Harper Law and Order Government came to power. It was always thus. The history of policing is the history of putting down protest, in particular working class protesters. Since its inception under Sir Robert Peel police replaced state militias whose purpose was to break up workers strikes and rallies.

The widespread distress accompanying the Napoleonic Wars had repercussions in Oxford. Food, money, and coal, bought with large sums subscribed by the city and university, were given or sold cheaply to the poor, but nevertheless violence flared sporadically because of high food prices.
In 1800 a troop of horse was sent to Oxford from Reading, and the local
militia was called out after countrymen had been intimidated in the market,
and the mob had threatened to attack the town hall and colleges; other poor townsmen terrorized farmers in neighbouring villages, forcing them to promise to sell their corn cheaply.
In 1814 J. I. Lockhart, the city's M.P., was forced to enter the city armed
after voting against the import of corn.
With the return of peace Oxford settled back to a more somnolent state, broken only rarely by such outbursts as the arrest, and subsequent rescue in Oxford, of those accused of the riots connected with the inclosure of Otmoor in 1830.
In 1856 many townsmen, disappointed of an official celebration on the ending of
the Crimean War, lit bonfires in the streets; one at Carfax aparently destroyed the
city stocks.
The last major riots occurred in 1867, in protest at an increase in the price
of bread, and in the wake of similar riots in the West Country. A detachment of
Guards was sent from Windsor, and peace restored by a reduction in bread prices.

• 1815 Victory at the Battle of Waterloo brings peace to Europe. Bands of demobbed soldiers roam the countryside surviving by begging. A group of ex-soldiers camp in the Forest of Bere, in an area now known as, 'Waterlooville'.

• 1829 Metropolitan Police Act - Robert Peel, Home Secretary forms Metropolitan Police who also police naval dockyards in areas like Portsmouth.
• 1829 Invention - Stephenson's 'The Rocket' steam train wins trials.
• 1830 Violent 'Swing' riots by farm workers in southern England seeking higher wages and the end to mechanisation - 9 executed, hundreds transported or imprisoned
• 1830 Selborne and Headley Workhouse riots. William IV succeeds George IV as King
• 1830 Employment law limits 12 -18 year olds to maximum of 12 hours work a day, 9 to 13 yr. olds to 9 hours
• 1832 - 1889 Winchester City Police formed and year of the Great Reform Act doubling the number of people eligible to vote
• 1834 Abolition of Slavery and The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 - An Act for the Amendment and better Administration of the Laws relating to the Poor in England and Wales is one of the most significant pieces of social legislation in British history. Read about the Workhouse
• 1835 Municipal Corporations Act - Boroughs to appoint Watch Committees

Community policing does not mean the police are part of the community or under community control quite the contrary it means they police 'the community'. It is class war by any other name.

The history of modern law enforcement began 166 years ago with the
formation of the London Metropolitan Police District in 1829. By
creating a new police force, the British Parliament hoped to address the
soaring crime rate in and around the nation's capital, attributed at the
time to rapid urban growth, unchecked immigration, poverty, alcoholism,
radical political groups, poor infrastructure, unsupervised juveniles,
and lenient judges. The principles adopted by Sir Robert Peel, the first
chief of the London Metropolitan Police, for his new "bobbies" have
served as the traditional model for all British and American police
forces ever since. These principles include the use of crime rates to
determine the effectiveness of the police; the importance of a centrally
located, publicly accessible police headquarters; and the value of
proper recruitment, selection, and training.

Prostitution, Race and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire, by Philippa Levine. New York, Routledge, 2003. ix, 480pp. $104.95 US (cloth), $26.95 US (paper).

A wealth of material is covered, though her findings can be reduced to what many scholars have begun to agree upon: that colonies were seen as posing a persistent threat of moral degradation, that European women merited protection while "native" women were to be controlled, that European men complicated matters through their symbolism of strength yet lascivious lives, that the realm of sexuality was a constant worry given its ready possibility of racial and other hierarchical transgression.

The RCMP's inglorious history as the State Police and Policing for the State was pacification of the West for the CPR control of the aboriginal and metis population, and includes massacres of working people, such as in Estevan, Saskatchewan during a miners protest in the 1930's.

And of course who can forget their actions in Quebec in the seventies or infiltration of the Anti-War movement and the Left with agent provocateurs, which produced a scandal leading to the creation of that other State Police Agency; CSIS.

The State is against the people it functions for the good of capitalism, as does its police who view property as more important than people.

These cases are not about tasers perse but about out and out police brutality, the police culture of self investigation and the lack of civilian oversight of all police forces including the RCMP. It is also another reason for unionizing the RCMP.

It is also the greatest chink in the Law and Order armour of the Harper Government.

The public demonstrations this weekend protesting the death of Robert Dziekanski show that people are not being sucked in by the Harper Law and Order agenda. In fact it is a breathe of fresh air to see folks finally protesting and challenging the police who have forgotten whom they serve and protect; the very citizens they view as their enemy.



SEE:

Video Not Taser Creates Inquiry

Repeated Cover-ups by Mounted Police

Conservative Governments Kill Workers

Police Black Bloc

Canada’s Long History of Criminalizing Dissent

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The Carbuncle of Class War

This has been a well known fact for years Marx suffered from boils. Now some dweeb is explaining his theories of alienation experienced by the working class under capitalism as the result of his condition.

Karl Marx suffered from a skin disease that can cause severe psychological effects such as self-loathing and alienation, according to a British dermatologist.

The father of communism’s life and attitudes were shaped by hidradenitis suppurativa, said Sam Shuster in the British Journal of Dermatology. One of its symptoms is alienation – a concept that Marx, a martyr to boils and carbuncles, put into words as he wrote Das Kapital.

“In addition to reducing his ability to work, which contributed to his depressing poverty, hidradenitis greatly reduced his self-esteem. This explains his self-loathing and alienation, a response reflected by the alienation Marx developed in his writing.”

This is reductum ad absurdum that results from a shallow attempt to deconstruct Marx. And it isn't even new. It is pop psychology of the right, an attempt to dismiss ideas by dissing the man. Not unlike Aileen Kelly's attack on Bakunin.

The fact is that Marx's poverty exasperated his disease. If anything his suffering poverty, like that of his fellow European working class immigrants to England, placed him within the class. And his skin condition had nothing to do with his revolutionary ideas, he had evolved those long before his skin condition became a problem.

Karl Marx did his best writing on deadline.

Commissioned by the Communist League in mid-1847 to write a "profession of faith," Marx and Engels procrastinated, traveled, experimented with form and might never have written the manifesto of the Communist Party if not for a sternly worded letter from the league ordering them to deliver the document by February 1, 1848.

A few all-nighters later, Marx produced a stirring document that by now has been read by tens of millions of people. Far fewer realize that regular deadline commentary provided Marx with the closest thing he ever had to actual employment. From 1852 to 1862 he was a regular London correspondent for the New York Tribune. All told, Marx contributed almost 500 columns to the Tribune (about a quarter of which were actually written by Engels). Marx's newspaper writing takes up nearly seven volumes of the fifty-volume Collected Works of Marx and Engels--more than Capital and indeed more than any of Marx's works published in book form.

The Tribune was in some ways a logical place for Marx's journalism. The paper was founded in 1841 by Horace Greeley as a crusading organ of progressive causes with a pronounced American and Christian flavor; one contemporary writer described the paper's political stance as "Anti-Slavery, Anti-War, Anti-Rum, Anti-Tobacco, Anti-Seduction, Anti-Grogshops, Anti-Brothels, Anti-Gambling Houses." During Marx's tenure as a correspondent, the Tribune was the largest newspaper in the world, reaching more than 200,000 readers.

At the same time, there was probably no publication in the world that would have been a perfect fit for Marx's cantankerous prose and personality. Even when Marx wrote in English, his strident Germanic tone dominated. His analysis was so unsparingly radical that at times the Tribune felt the need to distance itself from its fulminating London correspondent; introducing one of his 1853 essays, for example, the editors wrote, "Mr. Marx has very decided opinions of his own, with some of which we are far from agreeing," but then conceded that "those who do not read his letters neglect one of the most instructive sources of information on the greatest questions of current European politics."

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Just In Time War

When capital needs to speed up production of surplus value, profit, it makes workers work faster, longer, it takes its investment in each worker and forces them to produce more. This is known as the speed up.

The development of Toyotaization of manufacturing is known as 'Just In Time Production'. Production is set at an upper limit, no excess stock is manufactured any goods needed are then produced on as need basis.

This is the rational behind the Bush Surge in Iraq. The reservists and volunteers are the working class and the factory conditions are replicated within the military;

Army Extends Iraq Tours to 15 Months

Pentagon extends tours for US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan

15 Month Tours in Iraq? The War is Breaking Our Military

This is no different than the forced Over Time (OT) that workers in America have faced since the 1980's. Reductions in workers, layoffs, etc. led to increased OT for those that remained, increasing America's productivity. Productivity, the creation of surplus value; profit, was the mantra of the corporations adopting their management models to the need of capital.

And since these same neo-cons were in charge of the war in Iraq, they determined to use a corporatist model of political economy of war. While workers in the G6 produce material, those same workers in Iraq and Afghanistan destroy the excess production.

Since the U.S. armed forces,like Canada's, are the surplus working class, an all volunteer force, they act as a force on production; profit. Not only for the War Profiteers, but for those in the service of the State and those who having been formally associated with the State are now private contractors.

Since the U.S. has no extra armed forces it can put in the field it plays numbers games. This has been the whole reason d'etre of the neo-cons. Rumsfeld is gone but his policy lives one.

A volunteer army is working class, they joined not to fight in Iraq but because prior to 9/11 they were promised jobs, and training in job skills. And like their counter parts in industrial capitalist economies, the working class who fights Capitals wars are insufficient for their purposes. Thus the privatization of war in Iraq, the hiring of mercenaries to do your dirty work. Even with the privatization of security, cleaning, cooking and other services there are still not enough troops in the regular military to conduct this neo-con war, so their shifts at work are extended.

This is Class War according to the neo-con political economy; speed up and just in time production. The surge is the speed up, the lack of troops is the just in time model. Further added to this was the other cornerstone of neo-con political economy; privatization. There are as many private security forces in Iraq as their are U.S. military personnel. War conducted on a business model is Rumsfelds legacy which is legacy of failure. Red flag or white flag? Bush wants somebody else to run Iraq war


See:

A Surge in Terrorism

Sadr Surge

Surge In Iraq

Vietnamization of Iraq

Calling A Spade A Shovel

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CN Wildcat

Canadian workers did not wait for permission from their Yankee Union Bosses to go on strike. And of course it began in Montreal, since Quebec workers have a long history of labour militancy.

- Canadian National Railway Co. said on Saturday that 2,800 of its conductors and yard-service workers at its operations in Canada began a strike, a work stoppage that could affect the country's key shipments of grain, timber and other commodities.

CN, Canada's largest railway, said it was putting management personnel on trains and in switching yards to continue freight operations across Canada because of the strike by members of the United Transportation Union (UTU).

CN said the strike is restricted to Canada and its other unionized employees remain at work.

CN said it was ready to negotiate with the UTU at any time, but the company was seeking to have the strike declared illegal because CN said it had been informed that the certified bargaining agent of the UTU members employed at the rail company had not authorized the walkout.

CN says that the proper union representatives did not authorize the strike action and will file a complaint with the Canada Industrial Relations Board.

The union admits that while its international president has not provided authorization, it does not affect the legality of the strike.

Rex Beatty, a representative for the UTU said in a statement that the union was “disappointed that it could not reach a negotiated settlement.”

The union submitted an offer to CN that included 3 percent wage increases, paid every Jan. 1 between 2007 and 2009 and also sought a $1,000 bonus paid to employees March 1.

See

Unions

CN

Strike

Independent Unions

This is Class War

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American Union Bosses

Here is an perfect example of why we need autonomous democratic Canadian unions.

Conductors at Canadian National Railway Co., the country's largest railroad, won't strike immediately after a midnight deadline even if labor talks today don't produce an agreement, a union official said. The United Transportation Union chapter, which represents Canadian National's 2,800 conductors and yard workers, needs to apply for strike authority from its Cleveland-based headquarters, Frank Wilner, a union spokesman, said in an interview today.

It's not the workers who decide to strike but the 'union bosses' ,as the Sun newspapers call 'em , in the U.S. This is the real meaning of International Unions operating in Canada, they are American business unions run by union bosses rather than by the members.

CN workers are represented by three different unions, which just goes to show that they need One Big Union of all the workers, run by the workers.

And here is another reason for Federal Anti-Scab legislation.

The company has said it will continue its freight operations across Canada during a strike, with management personnel performing the UTU-represented conductor and yard-service jobs.

This is just another CN disaster in the making, refusing to negotiate while raking in record profits and subjecting its workers to speed ups and accidents.

See

Independent Unions

This is Class War

Unions




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